Monday, 24 January 2011

Embrace the Fake: Second Life may be best when it is a stage

In the future Virtual Realities will come in lots of different types and be used for different reasons from augmented reality, to gaming, to education and training. In theory Second Life is kind of a Proof of Concept for all of them. A site like IMVU embraces the fantasy and community feature, while EVE is game playing. Twinity would probably be best for education and augmented reality.

This SIM illustrates Second Life's power as a staging platform, as a next generation of collaborative Hollywood. The mountains int he distance are not really modeled, but fake low prim visual effects that give the entire SIM a lovely look, but when viewed from behind are shown to be infinitely thinner than paper.

And what is sold is pure illusion. A stage and the costumes. If only the interface was better Second Life would be a wonderful place to enact theatre, but given the low quality of movement and graphics one should not be surprised that the basest and most common genre has taken over: that of pure pornography.